A Walking Shadow Sewn On With Soap
by Penbee of Treewood
Summary: Innocence lost.  Peter Pan, whatever his incarnation, was dead.  Tsunade muses on the life and death of a ninja's youth.


A Walking Shadow Sewn On With Soap  
_Innocence lost._ Peter Pan, whatever his incarnation, was dead.  
12. children

There is a children's story Tsunade remembers reading when she was younger. It is the tale of a young orphan boy who is whisked away to a land where children never get old and where adventure never ceases. On nights like these, where starlight seems infinite and cold, she wonders what that would be like... (_Wendy Darling, he says, come with me and be my mother. Tell me stories and tuck me in at night_). Once, maybe, but it is so hard to think a happy thought when the life of a ninja tears the wide-eyed wonder out of the world.

And yet...

Here they are, eternal children parading through a colorful never-grow-up land. Not much has changed, really. Their wooden swords have been traded for kunai; the evil pirate captain, the stern Indian chief, and the buxom mermaidens have manifested themselves as ninja villages and missingnin, and games and the love-of-hunts-that-never-end turned into nothing more than perpetual missions, wars, and assassinations. Tomorrow and the next generation play the games of yesterday and the first.

Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow...

Has she any more tomorrows? Time and old age is a crocodile nipping at her heels. Sometimes she can almost hear the low tick-tock moving through the darkness. It is coming for her next, just as it hunted those before her and will hunt still those to come.

Pixiedust and thimble-kisses for the lost boys and the little girl who would serve as their mother... it would all be lost in the wind.

_Come away with me...I'll show you how to fly...I'll give you immortality and place you among the heavens._

_The second star to the right is ours._

For Orochimaru, immortality was through others, stealing their bodies and imprisoning their souls. He never realized Neverland is always an illusion. Immortality is a fraud. Life does not go on forever. The rest of them knew all this time, and yet...

tick-tock . tick-tock

_The clock is winding down. The crocodile is preparing to strike._

Gazing up sadly in the direction of the Hokage monument, she wonders if they aren't all searching for a piece of immortality...just to ward off that sharp-toothed croc.

Taking the children under their wings, the lost boys make more lost boys...living forever by seizing the bodies and souls of students and molding them into replacements of ourselves. Rasengan, Chidori, Shadow Possession, Eight Chakra Gates, Gentle Fist...a father to a son, a teacher to a pupil, and on and on it goes, that spiral of eternity.

tick-tock

On and on in this petty pace, from day to day to the last syllable of recorded time... _and thus it will go on, so long as children are gay and innocent and heartless..._

Closer and closer to death and their own demise and they perpetuate death into others in order to live. Girls, fame, reincarnation, it's all a quest for the fountain of youth. It is the chance to live forever in Neverland. So many names on the memorial stone. Those who fly for the sun, but run out of pixie-dust and the crocodile catches them in the plunge into the sea.

They were all too young to know that their paths were decided before they were born. All go down the same dusty road to the same death. The earnest boy--which one?--who would be Hokage died before he could see his dream. The curious child in search of his own eternity learned to reincarnate himself in a thousand bodies and killed his own soul. The old man who chased young girls for that juvenile joy of seeing under their skirts...

But what a clever game! Peter will never grow up as long as he has more lost boys and Wendy will live on in her daughters, her daughter's-daughters...

No one ever has to grow up. Or die.

Except.

They do.

There are more names on the monument today. The list grows with increasing urgency, as if spiraling to some untimely end. Children whose parents Tsunade remembers as children...younger every day. Growing up is coming sooner than anyone ever expected. And to think there was a time that, with a simple touch of her hands, Tsunade could breathe life back into those bodies, give them back their youth.

_If you believe, clap your hands!_

No. Her hands fail her. Nawaki. Dan. Jiraiya.

The thimble drops. The kiss...it's only death. He had the right idea. Seek eternity and youth. Don't let the shadow of death fall over his shoulders. Stick it with soap; death's shadow will prance off and he'll be free. Sewing on the shadow, she'd condemned him to his own end.

Peter Pan, whatever his incarnation, is dead.

Below, in the blurred glow of Konoha, Sakura and Naruto walk home together, their voices still the voices of children, but time is catching up. That crowing laughter and motherly affection have been dimmed by mourning and will soon be lost altogether, and this Wendy and this Lost Boy will go the way of their predecessors.

"Tsunade-sama? Please come inside. It's getting cold and I've even made some tea..."

When did Shizune get so old? She was always such a fresh-faced child; now she is beginning to show her age. Her face is thinning, her eyes have grown tired. She is not the young sprite she once was.

In contrast, Tsunade is hard-pressed to remember a time when her own reflection did change, having lived in the illusion of twenty-something-years-old for so long now, but...

"The night is young, Shizune. I'm sure you can find something harder than tea. That old coot Jiraiya must've left me something to forget him by."

_And she is ever so much more than twenty._

AN: Credit where credit is due. Aside from Naruto, very obvious references and direct quotations from J. M. Barrie's _Peter Pan_ and William Shakespeare's _Macbeth_, Act 5, Scene 5, lines 17-27, as well as an allusion to the myth of Icarus.


End file.
